I love SQLiteStudio. On my machine it starts up in < 2s. Version 3.2.1 takes 99MB disk space and is built against QT5. I just ran some queries and the memory usage is only 80MB for a not too large database.
Another self-contained application I like is racket/drracket.
The 1992 study is basically irrelevant since the job market has changed drastically. There are way more self taught computer people out making money without degrees than in 1992 as just one major factor that has changed in over two decades.
The Berkeley study is missing a lot of data and is dated as well from 1999. I searched for the most common high paying non-degree jobs and found nothing about them. Plumbers, electricians, construction contractors, certain kinds of farmers, etc... Recently on HN it was said that construction works in California were starting at $45 an hour in many places. I know plenty of people who got non-stem degrees that do not make that 10+ years out of college and working professionally in their field the whole time.
Then there is the issue of colleges and textbooks constantly increasing costs while not increasing the value of the degree itself. In fact in many instances degrees are worth less now since colleges pass students to keep that fire hose of government backed money coming in. There are numerous documentaries on youtube that go into depth of how colleges are ripping people off in many instances.
The main value of college is the ability to network with people so that finding and getting a job becomes easier. The job hunting process is broken and there are always new startups trying to fix it. In high school they pushed college as the solution to everything harder than a drug dealer slinging product. It is easy to find people who got that degree and their job and earning problems are not solved. Going to college no matter what is a dogma.
It is not clear at all that a college education is going to increase your lifetime earning. You have to pick the right field, get your debt settled quickly, live in or move to the right area and conquer the job hunting process and then you might come out ahead. I think high school students should be better educated on how the market works and there are plenty of non-degree jobs that have serious earning potential. Also the US has neglected trade schools as a job training solution while European countries have not.
> "In 2013 the "conservative" Brookings Institute seemed to agree..."
Setting aside the core causation/correlation problem with your claims about scholastic credentials, it's absurd to call the Brookings institute conservative. It's centre left and, in US election donations, its employees give 97.6% Democrat.
I am currently out in the sticks in the U.S. near a major interstate highway. I have one option for wired internet which is DSL. The max speed is 5Mbps down and 0.5Mbps up. I have a choice between 2 wireless companies that will gladly lock me into a 2 year contract at ~$100 a month with a bandwidth cap of 200-300 GB a month. I have asked around and it has been this way for ~10 years and the local ISP has no intention of an infrastructure upgrade. I check the broadbandnow website every month and there are no new options. This is the free market most of the people living in rural America deal with. I previously lived in a major city and had 100Mbps down and 30Mbps up with no data caps.
Now think about how slow that is. I have to wait for Youtube to buffer up and Netflix/Hulu were so unusable I canceled my service. Watching anything live only works at the lowest possible resolution. VOIP is completely unreliable and gaming is spotty at best. The last time I had internet options this slow was the end of the 90s. Using census data there are 10,000+s of people out here dealing with this garbage level service.
The U.S. government defines broadband as 25Mbps down and 3Mbps upload at a minimum. I currently do not have broadband internet.
According to a chart of the local LTE mobile internet options the max speed is 10Mbps. The fast test on my phone just reported the max speed as 1.9Mbps.
There is an over saturation of lawyers in America in many of the legal fields. Making the laws harder to access is a way for lawyers to add value to their jobs because it erodes away the ability for the common person to read, understand, and use the laws. Carl Malamud has pointed out this protectionist racket in the past and actively fights against it.
Lawyer here, although I went back to tech and don't practice as far as the public would be concerned. Access to the law has always been hard. Reading the laws (meaning statute) is easy and will only get easier. But for any matter of more than trivial complexity, you need case law. That's been difficult to access easily for a very long time, but even proposing that you live next door to a law library and can access all of the reporters and such, actually analyzing the case law is still hard. You need to know what's still good law, follow cites, etc. That's where Westlaw and Lexis make their money - their product is actually pretty good, if not horribly expensive.
Anyway, making (statutory) laws harder to access doesn't do much for lawyers. Most of the work is in the case law, and that couldn't possibly in the future get any more difficult to access than it is today.
If you're interested in this issue, follow Casetext. They're doing good work:
> Making the laws harder to access is a way for lawyers to add value to their jobs
Which fails to explain the ABA lobbying for this, since -- despite the misleading headline -- the ABA is actually pushing for making the laws easier to access, if not with as much freedom to make use of the content as some (myself included) would prefer.
(Really, I don't see any evidence that lawyers don't their jobs as protected by secret information that only they have access to that any layperson could use just as effectively, any more than computer programmers do; AFAICT, they are much more likely to see themselves as having invested considerable time in developing specialized skills that most laypeople don't have, and thus don't see themselves threatened by mere information about the content of the law being more freely available.)
I could see some forces wanting to create a Genius-style annotated version of all the laws of the land. DRM and a EULA would be a great way to slow down such a creation and keep the power in the ivory tower.
This is covered in the BBS Documentary[1]. A comparison of Phil Katz work showed he just renamed variables and moved things around. Phil rallied the BBS community to character assassinate Thom. The documentary is shot years later and Thom still breaks down and cries when talking about what happened. It is very sad.
The page says: "Enhanced Digital Downloads of the BBS Documentary series are planned. Please sign up here: sales@bbsdocumentary.com if you wish to be notified."
Just tried out nextdoor.com. It tried to load 6 different tracking and marketing scripts that my browser addons blocked. Craigslist has 0. I will not be using nextdoor.
It's nothing compared to what Google, Facebook, AirBnB, Uber and literally every other website you visit or email you open does.
Craigslist may not track your actions, but it doesn't ever update it's UI/UX or add features so there's no reason for Craigslist to collect user behavior data.
Now I completely respect your personal choice, but for others who are more willing to try out something that can provide them real value, I think Nextdoor will win over Craigslist every time.
I read the language log pretty regularly and they tend to have quality content. Then you got a post like this which says the book is bad and everything about it is bad after skimming it in a book store. An entire review based on skimming and a few out of context quotes does not make a well researched and thought out position on a book. At no point does the author say they actually read the book cover to cover. This is just a rant against being prescriptive in your writing since it is not "the one true way".
I have read On Writing Well and there is a lot of material covered in this book. I recommend the chapters on editing as that was Zinsser's day job.
Watch Jason Scott's BBS documentary to see the people who built many of the icons of the bbs world. It is 8 episodes long and is available on youtube right now. I have watched it multiple times and the depth it provides into what was going on is why I like it. I dialed into bbses for years to post messages, play games, and get patches. At the time I didn't fully grasp how wide spread the phenomenon was so when your favorite board went away it was brutal.
I see a lot of the bbs community feel in many online forums so I know it lives on.
Another self-contained application I like is racket/drracket.